Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: CIO Magazine Date: 10 November 2008

Why SCRUM’s agile development framework is more effective than the traditional “waterfall” approach.

SCRUM or agile development was originally designed for “typical” software development. The goal of any software company is to release high-quality software to market as soon as possible. In my extensive experience in software product management, I can tell you that in this type of “typical” software development environment:

• Scope is often not clearly defined and changes frequently. This is because there are more “unknowns” than in most corporate IT projects.
• Rather than tracking the budget closely (as is often the case in corporate IT projects), software companies will spend as many resources as they need to, to release the software to market as soon as possible.

SCRUM works well in this scenario because it enables the software company to be flexible with the project scope by defining a prioritised list of features (called the product backlog). The developers commit to a set of features they will complete within a time period of less than 30 days, which is called a sprint.